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Aaron2222

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As per the article:

  Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
It does require logging in (to the website) with a Microsoft account, but Microsoft claims:
  By logging in with your account, it will not associate the account to the licenses.
From there, it's just a web version of phone activation (you enter your Installation ID and presumably they give you the Confirmation ID). No idea what happens when moving a licence between machines (with phone activation, the automated process would fail due to the existing activation and you'd be handed off to someone in a call center who would generate the Confirmation ID for you).

A lot of core functionality is implemented as bundled plugins (they ship with the IDE, but can receive updates separately). They can also be independently disabled (and older versions used to come with only some enabled and ask you which others you want enabled at first launch).

This trick is something we teach our students when we do 6809 assembly (mainly as a trick to do addition on the index registers). I had no idea it was used as an optimisation in x86.

Tinymist in VS Code does this out of the box (and looks like it can be set up in other editors). That or you can configure it to save out a new PDF automatically on save or as you edit the document and just open it in a PDF viewer that'll reload when the file changes.

The loss of the --no-gatekeeper option isn't that big of a deal. It just removed the com.apple.quarantine xattr from the installed cask (which you can easily do yourself, or just allow the app from System Settings after Gatekeeper blocks it).

The more impactful change is the move to require all casks[0] (not just new ones) to pass Gatekeeper checks (so signed and notarized through the Apple Developer Program)[1][2]. There are a multitude of open-source applications which aren't signed and notarized through the Apple Developer Program (some due to the $99 per year cost, some due to needing to provide a legal identity and having that in the certificate, some who object to needing to do it at all). What this means is that you'll have to install these manually or use a 3rd-party tap (package repository) to install them.

Of course, Apple could solve this by providing a way for open-source projects to sign and notarize their apps without having to pay $99 per year and associate a legal identity. They've already got Xcode Cloud, they could allow use of that to build, sign, and notarize only from the publicly available source.

[0]: These are GUI applications (i.e. .app), where Homebrew downloads the official build of the app. CLI tools are done differently (the Homebrew project builds these from source), and nothing's changing there.

[1] https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/6334

[2] https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/6482

Apple Silicon won’t run unsigned apps anyway.

Technically true, but misleading. The macOS kernel won't execute an Apple Silicon binary that doesn't have a signature, but as Apple documents, an ad-hoc signature is enough to meet that requirement. That won't get you past Gatekeeper, but that's no different to how it is with unsigned Intel binaries.

i can't even just install and run the docker CLI--docker on Mac requires Desktop and commercial use of Desktop requires a license.

That's not on Apple. Docker needs the Linux kernel (for Linux containers), so it's no different to needing something like Docker Desktop to use Docker on Windows. Yeah, Docker changed the license on Docker Desktop, but there's plenty of alternatives (Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima, Apple's own container tool, or just running a Linux VM in Lima).

Typst 0.14 9 months ago

If you're not going to use the web app, you may as well sponsor them through GitHub instead. Also, you get stickers that way.

You can fix this with:

  defaults write -g NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
You can also have apps default to a blank document instead of the open dialog:
  defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

Terminal.app has a setting "Use Option as Meta Key" that needs to be enabled. It's under the Edit menu as well as in Settings > Profiles > Keyboard (if you want, you can click use Command-A to select all the profiles to apply the change to all of them at once). Ghostty will have a similar option.

Also surprised you haven't encountered this earlier, given it affects all usage of Alt in the terminal.